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Blurred Lines: Setting Healthy Boundaries at Work

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Success in the workplace depends on your ability to relate effectively to people. Research shows that 60-80% of all difficulties in organizations stem from strained relationships between employees, not from deficits in an individual employee’s skill or motivation.1

Difficult workplace relationships are far more than a nuisance; they can cause anxiety, burnout, clinical depression and even physical illness.

Healthy relationships at work can propel you to great heights of achievement; dysfunctional or toxic ones will tether you to mediocrity. When we mismanage relationships, the fall-out affects productivity and quite possibly our ability to advance. Your success at work depends on your ability to set the kinds of boundaries that encourage mutual respect and keep the focus on productivity.

7 Tale-Tell Signs of a Toxic Relationship

You’re in a toxic professional relationship with a boss or peer when they:

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About the Author

Van MoodyField expert Van Moody is the author of The People Factor (an upcoming release by publisher Thomas Nelson) and a motivational speaker who advises on matters related to relationships as they pertain to friends, family, significant others and the workplace. He is a ‘People Scholar’ who helps others build their ‘Relational IQ’ to achieve success at home, in their social circles, and in business. He may be reached online at www.vanmoody.com.

Reference

1. Association for Psychological Type International, APTI

What are you thinking? Here are a few of my thoughts!

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The minute I get a thought, I capture it. For the past year or so, I’ve been texting myself through voice dictation. It works. It’s the same way I am writing this column. Voice to text. It works.

I’m about to show you, and share with you, some of those random thoughts. They are in no particular order, and as I paste them into this word document I’m reading them aloud and altering them. (That’s how I edit.) I’m reading them and expanding them on the spot so they become even more valuable and applicable to a salesperson. You.

ON QUESTIONS
When someone asks you a question, ask yourself, “Why are they asking this, and what does this mean in terms of this person moving toward a purchase?”

There’s a motive behind every question a prospect asks. And that motive is the sales driver. In reality they’re thinking to themselves, if this function works, I can increase my sales. That’s the motive, not the function.

For example, they may ask you, “Can this function take place?” If you answer, “Yes,” then you’ve gone right past sale. If you answer yes and then ask, “What will this function lead to?” or “What makes this function important to you?” you will then uncover the real buying motive. In sales this is known as the hot button. The reality is, it’s your money.

WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?

  • In sales, the largest chasm is the difference between knowing and doing. You already know everything; the problem is you’re not doing it.
  • How many of you cannot afford to buy what it is you are selling? And how does that affect your belief system? And how does thataffect your passion to close the sale?
  • Whoever said, “Thoughts are things,” only had it partially correct. The better statement is, “Thoughts become things when plans are made, belief is strong, and action is taken.”
  • In a game of ‘sales chess’ you have to be thinking at least two moves ahead or you’ll likely lose your queen.

WHAT DO THEY REALLY WANT?
Your customer doesn’t want to buy a ball bearing. They want to keep their plant producing. Customers want outcome, not product. Your customer does not want a can of paint, brushes, and rollers. Your customer wants a beautiful room or a updated look to the exterior of their home. Sell OUTCOME, not product.

BE SPECIFIC.
Is your presentation full of generalizations or customization? If you only generalize for the enterprise and generalize about the business, you will lose. But if you customize for your customer, or their customer, they can visualize what’s in it for THEM, and they will buy.

SHOW ME THE MONEY, NOT THE PERCENTAGE
Don’t give me a percentage. Give me a dollar amount. EXAMPLE: You say, “We lost 7% of our customers this year.” Really? HOW MUCH IS THAT IN DOLLARS? That will make you mad. Large companies refer to this as “churn.” I define churn as management’s inability to keep customers loyal. And these same companies who call it churn only present it as a percentage. Our churn rate is 3.2%. Why doesn’t management have the intestinal fortitude to present that as a dollar amount? Answer: They don’t want anyone to know, and it places the burden on salespeople to replace the 3.2% in order to get to last year’s numbers. Not good.

WHAT’S THE REAL CHALLENGE WITH CRM?
Customer relationship management is the most purchased, least-used, and least-adopted software in the history of computers. Why? The salesperson looks at it as management’s tool for accountability. CRM adoption rates would triple if salespeople viewed it as something that could help them make a sale.

If you have CRM software for your sales and service people, and you have a 72% adoption rate, that means 28% of your sales team, and/or your service team, did NOT adopt it, and most likely hate it. I feel reasonably certain that of the 72% that did adopt it, a high percentage of them look at it as something they ‘had to do’ rather than something that would help them.

ON IMAGINATION AND WOW!
Salespeople are missing huge opportunities for engagement and opportunities to gain response from customers by not being imaginative or creative in their communications.

  • Show me a sales script, and I’ll show you a boring message.
  • Show me a slide deck prepared by marketing, and I’ll show you a boring message.
  • Show me an email prepared by a salesperson, and I’ll show you a boring message.

Where’s the value? Show me the value. Where’s the WOW? Show me the WOW! If you show me WOW and value, I will respond, I will engage, I will connect, and I will buy.

Those are my thoughts and ideas of the moment. All captured the second they occurred to me. Hope they get you thinking, taking action, and capturing yours.

Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.

About the Author

Jeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Sales Bible, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Black Book of Connections, The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Teal Book of Trust, The Little Book of Leadership, and Social BOOM! His website, www.gitomer.com, will lead you to more information about training and seminars, or email him personally at [email protected].

The New World of Beta Curation

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Today’s American corporate world is a tale of two cultures. One, more traditional and common, is centralized and hierarchical. I call it Alpha. The other, smaller and rarer, is decentralized, horizontal, and inclusive. I call this one Beta. To flourish in today’s business environment, organizations and individuals need to transition from the outdated Alpha system to the fast-growing Beta paradigm. The increased communication and collaboration required of Beta organizations demand a new style of leadership and career planning.

Beta leaders need to be curators, not commanders. Rather than striving to be content experts on every aspect of their operation, they need to be able to collect, sort, analyze data, and edit all communication and collaborative streams of information that could potentially influence their business. Organizations need to have dozens, maybe hundreds, of individual experts, fully capable of idea generation and innovative thought. In turn, these experts must be encouraged to drill down deep in their own specializations, develop plans and strategies, and share them with the rest of the organization. Beta leaders then need to sort through the ideas, figure out how they fit together, and then recombine them so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

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About the Author

Dana Ardi, Ph.D. is the founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors and the author of The Fall of the Alphas: The New Beta Way to Connect, Collaborate, Influence – and Lead. She has served as a Partner/Managing Director at CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners and was a Partner at Flatiron Partners. Earlier in her career, Dr. Ardi was an operating executive at R. R. Donnelly & Sons and at McGraw-Hill. She also has a background managing and leading executive search firms. To read Dr. Ardi’s complete biography, click here.

The Advisor’s Corner – How can I build relationships with key stakeholders?

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Stakeholder relationshipsQuestion:

How can I build relationships with key stakeholders?

StrategyDriven Response: (by Roxi Hewertson, StrategyDriven Principal Contributor)

Competition for our time has never, in the history of human kind, been so intense. Yet, if we fail to make time to connect in authentic and meaningful ways with other people, we cannot lead well and our business results will suffer dramatically.

By connecting well, we can discover where we have opportunities for synergy with others. Synergy can be defined as two or more people (or things) functioning together to produce a result NOT independently obtainable. Synergies are important both within and outside our primary workplace. There’s even a new word to describe this when we connect well with our competitors – ‘coopitition’ or ‘coopertition,’ meaning two or more competitors working together to achieve a common goal.

Here are three things you can do to connect and look for opportunities for synergy:

1. Ask don’t tell. Too often people are ‘telling’ others what they think, want, know and feel. Stephen Covey reminds us to “Seek first to understand, then seek to be understood.” This wisdom comes from the native peoples throughout the world and is found in every scripture known to human kind. Yet, we are often too busy or too focused on our own ‘stuff’ to remember this.

2. Find common ground. When two or more people choose to take the time to look more deeply, they can and will find common ground where they can build a powerful foundation for trust and collaboration. Try this:

  • Seek out things you have in common with others – values, family, books, artwork, background, education, passions, experiences… you’ll find them.
  • When you’ve made a connection, build upon it. Allow yourself to share some vulnerability. This gives others more safety to do the same. The more authentic you are, the more authentic others can risk being with you.
  • Sometimes the best place to grow connection and common ground is with people with whom you disagree. When people have a common goal, a common enemy, or a common dream they can overcome differences in other areas. So next time someone disagrees with you consider saying: “Help me understand why you feel/think the way you do. I would like to learn more about your point of view.”

3. Get out of your chair. This is not a brilliant new idea, but more than ever we get stuck on our computers, notebooks, and phones. When you walk around, notice what people have placed in their workspace that matters to them, pictures, sayings, colors, etc. You will hear conversations you’d never hear otherwise, and you’ll be present. If you go with the intention to observe, connect, and catch people doing something right, and if you are listening, people will begin to look forward to the opportunity to see and interact with you. No time? Think again.

  • Randomly book 30 minutes once or twice a week to wander- with no agenda, no plan, and no goal. Come back to your workspace and write down what you observed and learned. Do not to jump to hasty conclusions – just note your observations and check them out the next week you wander around.
  • Randomly schedule 15-30 minute no agenda ‘chats’ with your employees, peers, others. Meet in their space, for lunch, for a walk around the work site.
  • Call up a few external people every month, to reconnect and keep your network fresh and alive.

Everything we do and how well we do it, in any enterprise, is impacted daily by the quality of our relationships. Building and strengthening our relationship, and finding win/win synergies with all our stakeholders, must be an integral part of every leader’s strategy for success.

About the Author

Leadership authority Roxana (Roxi) Hewertson is a no-nonsense business veteran revered for her nuts-and-bolts, tell-it-like-it-is approach and practical, out-of-the-box insights that help both emerging and expert managers, executives and owners boost quantifiable job performance in various mission critical facets of business. Through AskRoxi.com, Roxi — “the Dear Abby of Leadership” — imparts invaluable free advice to managers and leaders at all levels, from the bullpen to the boardroom, to help them solve problems, become more effective and realize a higher measure of business and career success.

The StrategyDriven website was created to provide members of our community with insights to the actions that help create the shared vision, focus, and commitment needed to improve organizational alignment and accountability for the achievement of superior results. We look forward to answering your strategic planning and tactical business execution questions. Please email your questions to [email protected].

Evaluation and Control Program – Essential Organizational Behaviors

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StrategyDriven Evaluation and Control Program Principle ArticleEffective evaluation and control programs rely on a set of underlying behaviors promoting continuous performance improvement. While positionally dependent, these behaviors foster the continuous identification and resolution of performance improvement opportunities and shortfalls.

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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.